The original Hansel & Gretel-style house at the corner of Carmelita and Walden in Beverly Hills, known as the Spadena House and designed by Henry Oliver. It was built in Culver City as a set and office for a movie company and later moved here.

The Los Altos Apartments at 4121 Wilshire Boulevard (we drove Wilshire Boulevard all the way from the ocean at Santa Monica to downtown LA, one of the great drives in any American city – the only way we could have improved it would have been renting a convertible). Built in 1925, rather Spanish Colonial in design, it catered to the stars according to its Wikipedia entry, went bankrupt, was rescued, catered to a new generation of music and art stars, and so on. The rooftop signs are a feature of LA buildings that has, regrettably, disappeared from cities like Vancouver ....

Jerry's Motel, at 3rd and Lucas in the dodgy area known either as City West or Macarthur Park East (it is cut off from downtown by the Hollywood Freeway), catered to us – very well in its modest way. We ate breakfast at a tiny place a couple of blocks away and found dinners on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, about a five minute drive to the north, or in the old part of downtown, about five minutes by car to the east.

About a block from Jerry's Motel at 1425 Miramar Street stands the Lewis House, an 1889 design by Joseph Cather Newson. From Architecture: "Samuel and Joseph Cather Newson, best known for their often-illustrated Carson House in Eureka, California, produced some of the wonderfully inventive if not slightly 'mad' Victorian houses in Los Angeles in the Great Boom of the 1880s. Regrettably, most of these houses have disappeared one by one over the years."

The Sessions House, 1888, by Joseph Cather Newson, at 1330 Carroll Avenue in Echo Park, an old residential area near our motel that was once reached by streetcar but is now marooned by freeways. There are a number of interesting Victorians on this block, all gentrified in the middle of a poor, transitional area, including ...

... this Queen Anne beauty.

A more accurate reflection of our Hispanic-flavoured 'hood, around the corner from Jerry's on 3rd Avenue...

A mural of Anthony Quinn in downtown LA, across the street from ...

... the fabulous Bradbury Building, built in 1893 and renowned due to films like Blade Runner (this is a really poor photo of it), at Broadway and 3rd ...

The closed-up Tower Theatre, a 1925 design by Charles Lee at South Broadway and 7th; Lee went on in the 30s and 40s to become LA's principal designer of motion-picture theatres...

The marquee of the theatre on Broadway built by Charlie Chaplin et al to screen world premieres in the 1920s...

The Eastern Columbia Building at 849 South Broadway, designed in 1929 by Claude Beelman and LA's major ZigZag Moderne landmark of the era ...

... and its sunburst entry, so like the one on the Marine Building in Vancouver designed at the same time. The green terracotta is particularly striking under LA's blue skies.

The fashion/fabric district, just east of downtown on 9th – about two blocks of dazzling bolts of gaudy fabric lightning and fun fur displayed on the sidewalks ...

The lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, with a lookie-loo slightly less well-dressed than we were. Designed in the '20s by hotel specialists Schultze and Weaver, it is still a luxurious destination in downtown LA at South Olive and 5th. There was a bar where we thought we could shipwreck for a while but it was full, so instead ...

... we wandered a little in the corridors and gazed at photos like this one, of the 9th Oscars celebration in the hotel ballroom in 1937.

The corner of Hollywood and Vine, the centre of a certain universe, near sundown on a January evening. The sign of the famous Pantages Theatre, a real go-for-baroque sort of picture palace designed by Marcus Priteca (who designed the Orpheum in Vancouver), is visible on the right...

Pasadena City Hall, a wedding cake of a building for a conservative, wealthy community ...

The famous Gamble House, by Pasadena's great Craftsman architects Greene and Greene, built in 1908...

A rare Victorian on Arroyo Terrace in Pasadena, unusual for such an Arts and Crafts/Craftsman suburb...

A house on Prospect Boulevard in Pasadena, a deft Arts and Crafts design with a modernist's touch...

The backside of Frank Lloyd Wright's "La Miniatura," the first of his "textile block" houses, dating from 1923. Access to a more frontal view was blocked by a film crew using the leafy Pasadena streets ...

The rake's progress: the little Zen patch of the Japanese garden at the Huntington estate in San Marino, adjoining Pasadena.